Had this sent to me the other day, and figured it was worth passing 
along to the list-managers list. It's mostly FYI, in case you're 
interested.

----

For any of you interested in Sieve (proposed Internet standard language for
filtering mail), we've just put up a small web page on the subject

http://www.cyrusoft.com/sieve

This web page is for the general community of vendors doing development of
the syntax, not anything Cyrusoft or Mulberry-specific. We'll add a link to
a more self-centered page on our own plans at some point 8-).

I've gotten a fair number of inquiries in recent months about topics
related to Mulberry and general mail architecture that are addressed by
Sieve in one way or another.

Basically, Sieve will provide portability for filters, so that they can
(ideally) be written by graphical clients but stored and executed by mail
servers. Obviously this requires support from both sides of the
transaction, but there's a very solid base of vendors currently pursuing
Sieve, including some instantly-recognizable names (in addition to obscure
little old Cyrusoft 8-).

We're basing the internal storage syntax of "simple" Mulberry filters in
Mulberry 2.x on Sieve for portability and interchange. This way, if you set
up a bunch of filters in Mulberry and want to share them with your friend
who for some bizarre reason uses another Internet mail client, then the
filters can be exported and re-used (assuming this other hypothetical
internet mail client supports Sieve syntax as well). I'd note the long-term
design for Mulberry filters will provide more functionality than the Sieve
standard has built in, but I would consider these 'advanced' features, and
wherever possible, we'll endeavour to document these as possible extensions
to the Sieve language.

I'd also note that Sieve filters can hypothetically be sent up to the
server by a variety of possible routes: editing a file, ftp, http, acap,
ldap, even via email submission. Methods for doing this will vary. However,
we'll likely provide early support through Mulberry for ACAP storage of
Sieve filters for use by a participating server: this would allow some of
the niceties of IMSP addressbooks, most notably the ability to share Sieve
filters among groups of users. It may take a little while longer to get a
working arrangement for this, since there are multiple external
dependencies (an IMAP/SMTP server that's both ACAP and Sieve-aware, as well
as a released non-beta ACAP server), but it should provide some pretty
nifty functionality.

At this point, I'd encourage those of you who are very interested in the
concept to bug your server vendor of choice or ISP about providing early
support for Sieve filters.

- Matt Wall
  Cyrusoft
--
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